The God of Small Things

“You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before and she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She’s not perfect- you aren’t either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can hurt-her heart. So don’t hurt her, don’t change her, don’t analyse and don’t expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she’s not there.” -Bob Marley

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

"D'you know what happens when you hurt people? Ammu said.

"When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less."

A cold moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts landed lightly on Rahel's heart. Where its icy legs touched her, she got goosebumps. Six goosebumps on her careless heart. A little less Ammu loved her. The moth on Rahel's heart spread its velvet wings, and the chill crept into her bones." (107)

"Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks, its scars, its wounds from old wars and the walking-backwards days all fell away. In its absence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain to see as the water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel as the heat on a hot day, or the tug of a fish on a taunt line. So obvious that no one noticed." (169)

"It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain." (181)

"The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic." (218)

"Ammu smiled to herself in the dark, thinking how much she loved his arms— the shape and the strength of them, how safe she felt resting in them when actually it was the most dangerous place she could be" (319)

"They had nothing. No future. So they stuck of the small things. They laughed at ant-bites on each other' bottoms. At clumsy caterpillars sliding off the ends of leaves. At overturned beetles that couldn't couldn't right themselves...

Without admitting it to each other or themselves, they linked their fates, their futures (their Love, their Madness, their Hope, their Infinnate Joy). Each time they parted, they extracted only one small promise from each other:

Tomorrow?

Tomorrow." (321)